Introduction
An Onboarding Experience is a custom-designed, automated process that guides new customers through the first steps of using your product or service. It is a structured, step-by-step journey that helps your customers understand the value of your offering, achieve early success, and become confident users.
Example Onboarding Experience
With CustomerHub, you can now build personalized onboarding experiences that include user and administrator tasks, multimedia content, automated reminders, progress tracking, prerequisites, customer messages, and more; all tailored to meet your customers’ unique needs. An onboarding experience is essential for making a great first impression, driving customer engagement, and reducing churn.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the process of creating a customized onboarding experience in CustomerHub that will automate and personalize your customer journey from day one.
Managing Onboarding Experiences
Create an onboarding experience
Follow these steps to create your onboarding experience in CustomerHub:
Navigate to Onboarding Experiences in the main navigation
Click the Create Onboarding Experience button (or alternately the Add button in the upper right hand corner of the Onboarding Experiences page) to give your onboarding experience a name, then click Create
On the Info tab, Specify the Audience (which users will get access to the onboarding experience), Assigned Admin (the default admin user on your team who is responsible for this onboarding experience), and optional Reminder schedule (the number of days in between reminder notifications sent to users in the onboarding experience)
Next, navigate to the Tasks tab to create your onboarding tasks
Finally, you will create onboarding tasks for each action item that you want to be included in your onboarding experience
Note: onboarding tasks include Name, Instructions, Assigned to (either the User or Admin who must complete this task), Availability, Completed by, and Due date (optional). Read more about task settings here.
Once all tasks have been created, you can Publish your onboarding experience by clicking the toggle button next to the title (when doing so, you will have the option of making this live for the selected audience on a moving forward or retroactive basis.)
That's it, you're DONE!
Task settings
Name - The task name is the title of the task and should be short and intuitive. This will be visible to your customers when the task is assigned to a user. Examples: "Welcome", "Download the guide", "Watch orientation video", etc.
Instructions - The task instructions should provide a more detailed description of how the user or admin can complete the task. This will be visible to your customers when the task is assigned to a user. Examples: "Watch the welcome video below, then click 'Complete' to advance", "Download the guide below, then click 'Complete", "Click the button below to browse our Surfing 101 help resources, then click 'Complete' to advance", etc.
Assigned to - This is who the task will be assigned to, either a user (customer) or an admin (member of your team).
When this can be completed (i.e. availability) - This setting allows you to specify one of two options:
Immediately - this task will be immediately available for the user to complete
Only when prerequisites are completed - this task will be 'locked' until all prerequisites (i.e. other tasks) are completed.
Example prerequisite:
Admin console view
User view
Completed by - this is the action that must be occur in order to complete the task. Options include: custom task (html embed), watch a video, listen to an audio, download a file, or completing a product.
Due date - this is the date the task is due in terms of # of days after the user gained access to the onboarding flow.
Managing user access
Users may gain access to an onboarding experience in one of two ways:
If the onboarding experience audience is set to 'Only users who have been given access', then users must be added to the onboarding experience manually via their user record
Alternately, if the onboarding experience audience is set to 'Users who have access to specific products', then users will gain access to the onboarding experience automatically (either immediately or at a future time, depending on whether the onboarding experience was published retroactively or on a moving forward basis).
Prioritizing onboarding experiences
When multiple onboarding experiences have been created, their priority is determined by their listing order on the onboarding experiences main page:
Onboarding priority example
In the example above, because Surf Club Onboarding is listed first and therefore will be given first priority, while Surfing 101 Orientation is listed second and will be given second priority. Admins can simply drag to change the order of the onboarding experiences.
What does priority do?
If a user has access to multiple onboarding experiences, priority will determine which onboarding experience they automatically enter when when logging into your CustomerHub site.
So in the example above, a user would be taken into Surf Club Onboarding automatically each time they log in (unless they are going directly from a Product, Post, or other notification that is taking them directly to another place). If the user is also in Surfing 101 Orientation, they would be automatically taken to that experience once Surf Club Onboarding is complete.
User features
Users can interact with active Onboarding Experiences in to your CustomerHub site or via email notifications which notify them at key moments throughout the onboarding journey.
Onboarding experience page
When users log in to your CustomerHub site, they will automatically be directed to any Onboarding Experiences they have access to that include any pending user tasks that can be completed.
From here, a user can take the following actions:
Complete the current task - to complete the current task, the user can simply click the "Complete" button at the bottom of the task content. The user will automatically be directed to the next available task.
Navigate to other available tasks - as long as other tasks to not have prerequisites set that are not satisfied, the user can navigate to and complete those tasks (please note that if a task is not available, it will show a lock next to it and the user will not be able to navigate to it).
Send a message to the admin - the user can send the admin a message by clicking on the message button and adding a message. The admin user will automatically receive an email notification any time a message is sent this way.
Navigate away from the onboarding experience - the user may navigate away from the onboarding experience by clicking the 'Home' navigation option in the upper right, or by clicking on the logo in the upper left.
Onboarding experience summary
Any time a User is in an active (not complete) onboarding experience, the onboarding experience summary widget will show on their user dashboard/home page in the site, as follows:
Onboarding summary (on Home Dashboard)
The onboarding experience summary displays a pulsing arrow button to encourage the user to navigate to and complete the onboarding experience. Once any/all onboarding experiences have been completed, the summary widget will be hidden from the dashboard.
Admin features
Admin tasks
Admin tasks is a feature of onboarding flows that allows CustomerHub Admin users (i.e. members of your team) to play a key role in your onboarding process. Admin tasks can be accessed via the admin task icon in the top-right of admin bar admin console, as pictured below:
Whenever a new task is assigned to an admin user, a blue indicator badge will appear over the admin task icon to show that new tasks are due, and when the icon is clicked an admin task window will slide out:
Admin actions
When an Admin clicks the action button (right arrow) the action modal will open:
The action modal will then allow the Admin to do any of the following:
Log an internal note - to log an internal-only note, add a message and make sure that the "Notify User" option is NOT checked, then click Save.
Send a message to the user - to send a message to the user, add a message and make sure that the "Notify User" option IS checked, then click Save.
Complete the task - to complete the task, make sure that the "Complete Step" option is checked, then click Save (please note that an internal note or message to the user may be added at the same time as completing the task).
Email notifications
Welcome notification
As soon as a user has been given access to an onboarding experience they will automatically receive a welcome email (pictured below):
Note: design elements in this email are imported from your CustomerHub brand center, including the email logo at the top as well as the button color which inherits your primary brand color.
Reminder notification
If onboarding experience reminders are enabled, the user will automatically receive a reminder email (pictured below) every "X days" as specified on the onboarding reminder schedule:
Message notification
If an Admin sends the user a message about the onboarding experience (learn more about this here), the user will also receive a message notification (pictured below):
